Presentation of MoMa’s Writing Club on Friday 26 July 2024.
Words: Anastasia Karavasileiou
Participating in the Writing Club of MoMa (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), I felt a part of a global creative community. I felt free to express myself. The mindfulness practice at the beginning of the workshop offered me consciousness; the other participants shared very important stories and made me feel that I belong to a group of 100+ persons who are connected literally, not only through zoom.
But there is light; there is choice and an exodus. The life in the community, the collaboration and mutual love and respect. Her pictures take us to places of different landscapes, where people can live and work together, act and react collectively and feel strong.
We had the opportunity to get in touch with the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier, a young photographer who transformed her personal and family stories into a universal message of hope and empowerment. She creates narratives that bring to light the history of slavery and black people’s oppression; the workers poverty and labor in the modern megacities. The environmental degradation and the water crisis.
She says “I am, because we are”.
Grandfather Mr. Smiley Riding on Their Tennessee Walking
Horses, Mares, P.T. (P.T.’s Miss One Of A Kind), Dolly
(Secretly), and Blue (Blue’s Royal Threat), Newton,
Mississippi. 2017-2019
The ethnographer, artist and yogi Aimee Meredith Cox took us to this journey with calmness, consciousness and acceptance. She says the pen of the ethnographer and the camera of the artist can talk about colonization, expressing the black feministic point of view. She brought to conversation the meaning of monument and called us to move our view from the colonial concept of memory and see the monument as a reminder of the struggles of oppressed people.
She introduced us the concept of intimacy of landscape through meditation, embodiment and writing. We talked about the word ceremony and what it means to us (ritual, sacred, connection and many other interesting suggestions). She gave her suggestion; moving from our situation to a different world, and the threshold between the two limits (a rite de passage).
in Her Sewing Studio in Homewood, PA. 2017
Women making place, making bodies. Everybody’s work is equally important. Labor, political action make their own monuments. The Frazer’s photographical work calls us to step in someone’s vulnerability, her vulnerability also, to her world, her family. Water crisis and poverty; but also, collaboration, moving to farm, community life.
Photograpy is Frazer’s vehicle to monument the collective work. She brings us all to the collective work, and inspires us. It’ s a monument of care, life, family and connection.
Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, with her
General Motors company retirement gold ring on her index
finger, (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32
years in at GM Lordstown Complex, assembly plant, van plant,
metal fab, trim shop), Youngstown, OH, 2019. 2019
Aimee Meredith Cox gave us two prompts.
Prompt 1: The Intimacy in/of Place
Prompt 2: Write a love letter to a “place.”
More details here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hhjOuLc3qYFxaIuCdP0KDRNV_NpQevof/view
My texts, following the prompts:
The Intimacy in/of a place: Love letter to a place
I still feel the humid calmness, the sound of the river and birds, I can still look up and see the branches of the trees rising into the sky. I can still experience the silence. My back rests on your trunk, my favorite tree. I belong to that tree; I become the tree.
I want to connect again and travel to my childhood’s places; to different landscapes; detached houses with a courtyard of the working class and rural life at the same time. Monuments of everyday life and everyday people. My family’ s home, my aunt’s home, where the garden is full of fruits and vegetables. People who spent most part of their life as workers in factories. But they know what is free time; they remember.
I spent mine at different places. But I always return here and now. Mother Earth knows me and always finds a place for me. My life is a textile of places and persons.
Worldbuilding/Black Radical Imagination. Returning to your love letter and continuing to draw insights, vocabulary, and strategies from the individuals and communities in Frazier’s work, begin the process of writing the manifesto for the world you want to be a part of building.
I want to be a part of a vivid community; a world of solidarity and inspiration through collective work and creation. I want to feel again that we can change our life and have the power to achieve it. We need again a place to connect and feel free. We need a life in nature; inside our nature. Together. Connection. Resilience; Sense of belonging; Coming closer and communicate; Learning and teaching, sharing and feeling deeper respect.
Our bodies are our places.
More Information here:
https://www.studiomuseum.org/search?query=LaToya%20Ruby%20Frazier